Open data can help create more than 3.0 billion US dollars a year of value added in seven areas of the global economy, according to the Director of the African Centre for Statistics, Oliver Chinganya.

Speaking on behalf of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) at the first UN World Data Forum taking place in Cape Town this week, Chinganya said open data could provide a number of benefits for countries and their National Statistics Offices (NSOs).

These benefits include: making cross-departmental sharing easier, less work for NSOs in providing services for the public and the creation of business opportunities for entrepreneurs and the business sector.

There are two things to consider when talking about openness [of data]: technical openness and legal openness, says Chinganya, who stressed that data should be free to use both commercially and by the public without restriction.

Chinganya railed against the use of PDFs (Portable Document Formats) to publish data by government departments in the African continent, calling this locking up data that would hinder their openness.

As far as technical openness of data is concerned, Chinganya highlighted that it would have to be machine-readable so that it can be retrieved and read meaningfully. Legally data should be made available for reuse via open licenses.